'A beautiful soul': Funeral held for baby boy killed in wrong-way crash on Highway 401
A funeral was held on Wednesday for a three-month-old boy who died after being involved in a wrong-way crash on Highway 401 in Whitby last week.
Canada's competition laws should be changed to prohibit cartel-like practices and wage-fixing deals in the country's grocery sector, a new report by the House of Commons industry committee says.
The report comes a year after Canada's big three grocers -- Loblaw Companies Ltd., Metro Inc. and Sobeys parent company Empire Company Ltd. -- cut temporary pandemic-related pay bonuses within a day of each other last June.
The move prompted the committee to hold hearings on the issue and invite senior grocery executives to explain their decisions.
While the retailers admitted to communicating with each other about ending their respective wage premiums of about $2 an hour, they denied co-ordinating the termination of the pay bumps, said the report, which was released Wednesday.
Michael Medline, president and CEO of Sobeys and Empire, said the company watched what other retailers were doing but did not collaborate or co-ordinate with competitors
"We would never do that," he told the parliamentary committee. "Let me be absolutely clear -- we did not co-ordinate our decisions with other retailers."
Metro president and CEO Eric La Fleche said he reached out to his counterparts at Loblaw and Sobeys to gather information -- not to obtain a tacit agreement on wages.
"The more information I have on what others are doing, how they are treating their employees and how much they are paying and for how long, is valid information that I tried to get," he told the committee last July.
But competing grocers communicating about wages at the executive level risks "a slippery slope towards cartel-like conduct," Matthew Boswell, commissioner of competition at the Competition Bureau, testified during the committee's hearings.
Yet he said the bureau lacks the power under the Competition Act to prosecute such behaviour and faces significant resource constraints.
Canada's competition legislation diverges from laws in the United States, where federal competition authorities can criminally prosecute wage-fixing agreements, Boswell told the committee.
In its report, the committee recommended Ottawa provide the Competition Bureau with more resources and align Canadian competition legislation with U.S. legislation in order to criminally prosecute such agreements.
"Doing so would clarify competition-related obligations for businesses active in Canadian and American markets, and facilitate co-operation between competition authorities in Canada and the U.S.," the report reads.
The report also said Canada's food sector would benefit from a code of conduct to address inequalities in bargaining power between food producers and grocers. The long-standing issue gained increased attention in recent months after some retailers unilaterally imposed higher costs on suppliers.
The committee has requested the government table a comprehensive response to the recommendations in the report.
At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, grocers said they offered pay premiums as a temporary measure associated with lockdowns.
As restrictions eased and shopping behaviour normalized, all three grocers made the decision to end pay increases, the report said.
Only Sobeys reintroduced its "hero pay" as provinces reinstated lockdowns, the report found.
Metro has offered gift cards to its front-line workers three times since phasing out the wage increase last June, while Loblaw announced a one-time appreciation bonus for workers in April.
Meanwhile, union representatives told the committee that the wage premium for front-line grocery workers was an important recognition of their essential role during the pandemic.
They testified that withdrawing the pay bump exacerbated the already difficult working conditions in food retail, including low salaries and lack of benefits.
Unions play a fragmented role in Canada's grocery sector. While several unions represent a number of grocery workers across the country, the majority of food retail workers are not unionized.
A recent report on Ontario's grocery industry found that about 20 per cent of food retail workers in that province were unionized.
Grocers such as Empire, Loblaw and Metro are at least partly unionized in Ontario, while Walmart and many smaller chains are often not, the Brookfield Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship said in the report last month.
"Wages and conditions vary by worker tenure, retailer, and store," the report said. "One national employer noted they operated with 350 collective agreements nationally."
Loblaw did not respond to a request for comment while Metro said it did not have any comment.
But Sobeys vice-president of communications and corporate affairs Jacquelin Weatherbee said the company was thrilled with the report and its support for an industry code of practice.
"We recently sent the (industry) committee a letter to remind them that we do not, under any circumstances, believe in wage fixing -- whether it's legislated or not," she said in an email.
"We also stated that we would welcome any clarification to the legal regime around competitors engaging in wage fixing and we are pleased to read their recommendation to that effect."
This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 17, 2021.
A funeral was held on Wednesday for a three-month-old boy who died after being involved in a wrong-way crash on Highway 401 in Whitby last week.
There has been a "sophisticated" cybersecurity breach detected on B.C. government networks, Premier David Eby confirmed Wednesday evening.
Toronto police say a man was taken into custody outside Drake's Bridle Path mansion Wednesday afternoon after he tried to gain access to the residence.
U.S. President Joe Biden said for the first time Wednesday he would halt shipments of American weapons to Israel, which he acknowledged have been used to kill civilians in Gaza, if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu orders a major invasion of the city of Rafah.
Rookie goalie Arturs Silovs will start in net for the Canucks as Vancouver kicks off a second-round series against the Edmonton Oilers Wednesday night.
One of the Indian nationals accused of murdering British Columbia Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar says in a social media video that he received a Canadian study permit with the help of an Indian immigration consultancy.
Pfizer has agreed to settle more than 10,000 lawsuits about cancer risks related to the now discontinued heartburn drug Zantac, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the deal.
Quebec Premier Francois Legault is defending his comments about a new history museum after he was accused by a prominent First Nations group of trying to erase their history.
Independent U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had a parasite in his brain more than a decade ago, but has fully recovered, his campaign said, after the New York Times reported about the ailment.
The stakes have been set for a bet between Vancouver and Edmonton's mayors on who will win Round 2 of the Stanley Cup playoffs.
A grieving mother is hosting a helmet drive in the hopes of protecting children on Manitoba First Nations from a similar tragedy that killed her daughter.
A chicken farmer near Mattawa made an 'eggstraordinary' find Friday morning when she discovered one of her hens laid an egg close to three times the size of an average large chicken egg.
A P.E.I. lighthouse and a New Brunswick river are being honoured in a Canada Post series.
An Ontario man says he paid more than $7,700 for a luxury villa he found on a popular travel website -- but the listing was fake.
Whether passionate about Poirot or hungry for Holmes, Winnipeg mystery obsessives have had a local haunt for over 30 years in which to search out their latest page-turners.
Eighty-two-year-old Susan Neufeldt and 90-year-old Ulrich Richter are no spring chickens, but their love blossomed over the weekend with their wedding at Pine View Manor just outside of Rosthern.
Alberta Ballet's double-bill production of 'Der Wolf' and 'The Rite of Spring' marks not only its final show of the season, but the last production for twin sisters Alexandra and Jennifer Gibson.
A mother goose and her goslings caused a bit of a traffic jam on a busy stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway near Vancouver Saturday.